


Another Knowledge

by foxysquid



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Family, Death, Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-01 22:45:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13304922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxysquid/pseuds/foxysquid
Summary: In the Blade of Marmora, you can't allow yourself to grow too attached to your comrades. Emotion leads to error—but true detachment isn't so easy to attain, as Kolivan discovers.





	Another Knowledge

It ran in families, but not through the blood. It ran through words and gestures and action and thought, flowing from the parents down into the children. It wasn't a matter of genetics, but of care and intent. Children should grow strong. Children should be free. It was natural to want that for them. Each generation _should_ want more for the next and shouldn't satisfy itself with the current order. Some might have called it cruel, to instill that hunger, that drive to attain what might be unobtainable.

If one believed that freedom was possible, how much more cruel was it to immunize a child against it? To insulate them from hope, to protect them from change? There were greater dangers than death. Kolivan knew that. He had grown up knowing it. That knowledge had passed into him, a gift from his own parents. Before they'd died, his parents had told him: make yourself free. If freedom is kept from you, do whatever is necessary to increase the freedom of others.

He had done that. He hadn't followed their example purely because they'd told him to, but because everything he had seen and analyzed and understood had led him to decide that they had been right. That was why he had taken up their fight.

In the course of that long fight, much of what he did was watching and waiting, but those long periods of calm were punctuated by outbursts of violence. The first time he'd killed someone, he'd been relatively young, barely an adult. The target was a military man, a strategist of great value to the Galra Empire. He had managed to make it look like an accident: an explosion caused by an equipment malfunction. It hadn't been an accident, but it had never been investigated. He'd done his job well.

At the moment of the explosion, Kolivan had experienced a surge of satisfaction. There had been guilt too, and fear, but the satisfaction had been strongest. His people were natural hunters, but his pleasure didn't come from bloodlust. He had killed a tyrant and a murderer. His act had removed a monster from the universe, and it had increased the measure of freedom. For the first time, he had understood what it meant to deliver justice.

In time, the fear and guilt that came with each kill lessened, but so did the pleasure. Kolivan grew older, and he grew up. He saw every tyrant he killed replaced by another, just as eager to rise to power and spread the tyranny of the empire. As they rose, Kolivan lost so many of the friends he had fought beside. Justice wasn't joy. It was necessary. It was a hard, unending task, and he bent his back to it. He remained capable of feeling a grim kind of satisfaction, but that wasn't happiness. He had to look elsewhere for that.

More than once, he found it in a comrade's arms, but such liaisons were brief, by necessity. He couldn't afford to be distracted by affection when a close attachment could inspire the wrong decision while he was out in the field. Desire, passion—such things had to be put aside. It wasn't a sacrifice to give up anything that mattered less than freedom. If he felt regret—that didn't matter either. He wasn't free. He knew that, but he carried on for the freedom of others.

After many years, Kolivan looked up from his silent, secret battlefield and saw that he had lost so many of his elders, his mentors, and his commanders, that he had become the one in command. Who would have thought he would live to see that day? He had been so young, once. Time had passed, and it had carried them all along with it.

Who would have thought that his sister would one day have had a child? A birth in the family was an ordinary enough occurrence, but ordinary occurrences weren't for people like him or families like his. Kolivan gazed down at the squirming creature in his arms as if it were a mythical beast. The child was male. He was so small. His smooth skin was gray with a bluish tone, and his eyes were yellow. He resembled his mother, but Kolivan could see something of his parents in the boy, too. The child was quiet, but when Kolivan placed his hand lightly on the child's cheek, the boy turned his head and bit his uncle's finger. He drew blood. It was a good sign. Kolivan laughed, and the sound surprised him. He had grown unused to laughing.

This was exactly what he was fighting for: the children who would come after him, but he wasn't so sure how to deal with one individual child. What did it mean to have a child to care for? It was a matter of hope, but also of concern. It was of primary importance to ensure that there would be a next generation to carry on their mission and fulfill their dreams, but again, it wouldn't do to allow himself to grow too attached. He couldn't afford to indulge in sentimentality. In his world, sentimentality was dangerous, when an excess of emotion could cause mistakes.

He couldn't afford that weakness. Weakness cost lives, and he had many more lives than his own to consider. The people he knew would die—might die young, might die in great pain—and he had to bear it. It would be hard to bear if he allowed himself to care too much.

On his nameday, the child received the name Ulaz, which meant _steadfast_. He was still very small, to bear such a name. Kolivan attended the ceremony, and he gave the boy a blade which he was still too small to wield. It was his first bladed weapon. Ulaz clutched it to his chest, as if he were afraid of dropping it. Watching him holding it so carefully, even reverently, Kolivan told himself that he would look after him, but he wouldn't allow his heart to grow too soft. He wouldn't favor him.

When had he first failed in that mission that he had assigned himself? Could it have been when he started to give the boy lessons in fighting? Was it when Ulaz came of age? Was it when he passed his trial and became a Blade? Was it on the day that Ulaz came to Kolivan and told him that he had fallen in love with someone? Or was it during one of their brief mission transmissions—as he had listened to the fractured sound of Ulaz's voice speaking from within deep cover? Kolivan had been with him through all that—through discoveries and fights and confessions and everything that growing up entailed.

Whatever the final, fatal moment had been, he had never really succeeded, had he? He had failed not to love.

News of his nephew's death came to him simply and quietly. Ulaz stopped responding in the midst of a mission, that was all. The sensors in his suit that should have given life readings gave nothing, instead. Kolivan was experienced enough to know what this meant. He had seen it happen many times. The knowledge cut through him like the deadliest kind of blade, but one that does not kill the body. It slid in with no effort, and it left no mark, but its cut was deep. It went all the way through.

_He died well _was a common saying among all Galra, and not only within the Blade. Kolivan did not doubt that his nephew had died well, and with great reason. Ulaz had always done well, as patient and steadfast as his name. He had followed his orders, without fail. He had followed the orders that had led eventually to his death. Kolivan did not feel guilty about that. Not only were they all aware of the nearness of death, but Ulaz wouldn't have wanted him to take the blame. Ulaz had made his choices, and Kolivan would honor them for being _his_.__

___Knowledge or death_ was another saying—but one could have both, in some circumstances. There was the base knowledge that life had ceased, and then there was the knowledge that he had loved. He had well and truly loved, and it had taken nothing from him. It had only given him—so many things. Joy and hope and even moments of amusement. It had given him memories. When he closed his eyes, he could see the child laughing as he parried Kolivan's gentle blow with his blade. That bright child who had been as skilled with medicine and mechanics as he was with a weapon. They could have assigned him anywhere. He had been curious and eager, and—_ _

__These were an uncle's fond thoughts, and not the thoughts of a commander._ _

__When the Paladins arrived at Headquarters, Kolivan studied the two of them, standing side by side. They resembled nothing so much as two people who cared for each other. Ulaz, he knew by then, had given up his life for them, undoubtedly without hesitation and without complaint. For so many years, the Blade of Marmora had waited for the arrival of the Paladins and Voltron, and now they were here. Kolivan told himself not to favor them. He should avoid becoming fond of them. There was too much risk in doing that._ _

__Yet the knowledge of that risk did not stop him from caring. He understood, at last, that it never had._ _


End file.
